The vast quantity of e-mail messages that traverse electronic communication networks daily has led some users to implement filters for their e-mail messages. E-mail filters act to sort and organize e-mail messages based on various conditions. The filters may control the carrying out of actions on outgoing e-mail messages, but more typically control the carrying out of actions on incoming e-mail messages. E-mail filters may be characterized by one or more conditions and one or more corresponding actions.
A first example application of incoming e-mail filtering involves inspecting the “From” field of each incoming e-mail message arriving in a general e-mail Inbox folder and, if the “From” field of a given e-mail message indicates a specified address of a particular sender, moving the given e-mail message into a folder specific to the particular sender. That is, the condition is the presence of the specified address in the “From” field and the action is moving the given e-mail message. A second example application of e-mail filtering involves inspecting an attachment, if any, of each incoming e-mail message arriving in a general e-mail Inbox folder and, if it is recognized that the attachment of a given e-mail message includes a previously defined computer virus, removing the attachment from the given e-mail message. That is, the conditions are the presence of an attachment and the presence of a virus in the attachment and the action is the removal of the attachment. A third example application of e-mail filtering involves inspecting each incoming e-mail message arriving in a general e-mail Inbox folder in an attempt to recognize tell-tale signs that the given e-mail message is spam, i.e., an unwanted commercial e-mail message, and, if the given e-mail message is recognized as spam, moving the given e-mail message into a “Deleted Items” folder. That is, the condition is that the given e-mail message is spam and the action the deletion of the given e-mail message.
Increasingly, mobile communication devices are available and are used to receive and to send e-mail messages over wireless network connections. Mobile device servers generally facilitate the access at the mobile device to e-mail services, which services are generally provided by enterprise servers. Since the price for access to wireless networks is sometimes charged to the user according to amount of data received over a particular wireless network and some mobile device servers forward to the mobile device each e-mail message received at the e-mail server, some users are interested in optimizing the use of the particular wireless network for e-mail services. Such optimization may take the form of configuring the mobile device server with a filter so that, for instance, the mobile device server filters the e-mail messages that have arrived at an enterprise server so as to only automatically forward selected e-mail messages to the mobile device over the wireless network. The action of forwarding an e-mail message received at an enterprise server to the mobile device may be based on a condition such as the presence, in the “To” field, of the e-mail address of the user of the mobile device.
In another example, the optimization of the use of the particular wireless network for e-mail services may take the form of configuring the mobile device server with a filter so that the selected e-mail messages that are automatically forwarded (action) to the mobile device over the wireless network are e-mail messages addressed to the “work” e-mail address of the user of the mobile device (condition). In a sense, the filtering in this case acts to suppress automatic forwarding to the mobile device of e-mail messages addressed to the “personal” e-mail address of the user of the mobile device.
While the suppression of automatic forwarding of personal e-mail messages to the mobile device may suit the user during the week, the user may, on weekends, prefer to reverse the filtering and, thereby, suppress delivery of work-related e-mail messages while allowing delivery of personal e-mail messages. Heretofore, such reversal of filtering, or any other change in the configuration of the filters, has been accomplished, inconveniently, through manual re-configuration of the e-mail filters.